Chapter Twenty Cecilia
CHAPTER TWENTY
Cecilia
The tenth morning at sea brings the sight of the bordweal. Florin spots it first, and his shout of excitement brings Cecilia up to the deck. Many of the servants on board have never left Perfugi, so they crane over the side of the balustrade, pointing and blabbering.
Cecilia stands apart from them, watching the way the dome that surrounds Elben morphs, flickering from grey to black to silver, as though a permanent thunderstorm blankets the island.
“Will it hurt when we go through it?” one of the ladies asks those nearby.
“Only if you wish to conquer Elben,” a sailor replies, grinning at her as he passes. As others who have crossed the bordweal describe the play of bruise-like colours that can be viewed from inside the dome, Cecilia turns to the captain.
“I am going to view it from above.”
The captain’s eyes widen. “From the scoop, Your Majesty? It’s dangerous for someone not used to climbing.”
“Then I suggest you don’t permit my court to follow me.”
She places one boot carefully on the netting that leads to the top of the sails, then another, wiggling her hips to get her gown out of the way of her footing.
Once she has climbed into the scoop, far below the captain shakes his head and turns back to the helm.
She inhales, enjoying the vertigo. She looks out at the horizon, at the bordweal, and remembers the last time she saw it.
The eighteen-year-old Cecilia had climbed up to the scoop back then, too, although she had been more interested in looking back than forward.
She had watched the shores of Elben recede, the ugly spires of Cnothan the last things to fade behind the winter fog, and then she had turned to face the barrier that would divide her youthful life as a princess from her adult life as a queen.
When they had passed through the barrier, she had closed her eyes and laughed at the sensation – like being bathed in stars.
When she had opened them, the blue-green-purple she had known had turned to steel.
It is not as solid as it was all those years ago.
It eddies and flows, revealing misty shapes beyond.
Cecilia squints, sure she sees movement just behind the barrier.
The silhouette of a ship, five-sailed, like the ships of the Feorwa Isles.
She may be wrong (she isn’t) but the ship does not appear to be moving either across the bordweal and out into the open ocean or towards Elben. It is almost as if …
“Someone is waiting for us,” she tells the captain as she jumps down from the netting. “Ready the cannons.”
“My crew are not soldiers,” he says, running his hands through his scraggy hair, following her as she skips across the deck towards the stairs that lead down to the cabins.
“A precaution,” she says over her shoulder. “Maybe they merely wish to greet us.”
She does not return to her cabin, but takes the narrow stairs down to the hold.
A wave tips the ship starboard and Cecilia leers into the wall, scraping her arm.
She hopes that her curse will not have alerted Seymour to her presence.
Her velvet shoes are soft on the floor, the natural creaking of the ship’s bones covering the creaking caused by her step as she finds the whorl that permits her a view of Seymour’s cabin.
Seymour is sitting on her pallet bed, still clutching that curiously hard patch of her gown’s hem.
Cecilia has thought long about how to find out what it is she is holding.
Once they are on land, she will send a lady to take the gown by force.
If it were the linen shift Seymour was clutching, Cecilia could have a laundrywoman steal it, but gowns, which do not need to be washed, are not so easy.
The ship tips again and Cecilia braces herself.
The sound cannot have been so great, but Seymour starts, her hands moving across the object in her gown with increasing energy.
The ship tips once more and a shout goes up from the deck.
Seymour springs to her feet, looking up as though she can see through the ceiling. When Seymour smiles, Cecilia runs.
Her court are fleeing down the stairs.
“What is happening?” she asks them, but none answer. They push past her, ignoring her outrage. Florin grabs her and hauls her back down with him.
“Release me!” she shouts, kicking at him.
“It’s not safe. It’s not safe,” he keeps saying in her ear. When they reach the nobles’ quarters and solid ground, she spins around and pins him to the wall.
“What. Is. Happening?” she growls.
“The bordweal. It does not like us,” Florin says.
“That’s impossible,” Cecilia says. She pushes away from him, dancing out of his reach, and darts back up the stairs, mercifully empty now that her cowardly court has fled below deck.
Only the ship’s crew remains in the open.
They shout instructions to each other, running here and there to the sails, the tiller, the anchor.
“Turn about!” the captain shouts. “Lower the anchor to hard turn!”
Cecilia’s gaze is drawn to the great dome of the bordweal.
The steel grey has grown white, like the centre of a forge.
It roils, with a sound that is part thunder, part predator.
As she watches, the white flicks out a great fork of lightning.
It hits the scoop where she had, only moments ago, been standing.
The wood splinters, sending shards like daggers into the deck.
One hits a man in front of Cecilia, stabbing into his back as he runs.
He staggers against the balustrade, and does not move again.
Cecilia plucks the splinter from his body. It reminds her of a needle.
“It’s the queen!” the captain shouts at her, and it takes her a moment to understand that he does not mean her but Seymour. “She’s a traitor to Elben, and the bordweal knows it!”
Cecilia staggers towards him. “It is not her! This is some other power!”
“I’m telling you, it’s her! I want her thrown overboard, and that beast with her.”
He directs some of his crew to the hold to do just that, and Cecilia brandishes the wooden needle, still dripping with their crewmate’s blood.
“I am telling you, imbecile, that it is not her. That’s not how the bordweal works, or how else would Elben bring political prisoners back to the Tower?
How else would foreign diplomats enter?”
The captain pushes her wrist – and the dagger – away from his face. “It’s been years since you were here; things might have changed.”
His crew makes a run for the hold. Cecilia curses and slashes the captain’s face, once, twice, until he falls to the deck clutching bloodied eyes.
She runs after the crew, but the captain isn’t the first to make the assumption that Seymour is at the root of this.
Many in her court are already in the hold, banging on the cabin walls, shouting for her to be thrown out.
They’re all foreigners. They grew up with the bordweal as a cautionary tale, not a real, practical defence that only acts against armies, not individual traitors.
“Get away from there!” Cecilia says, her voice carrying above the din.
Those who understand not to cross her fall silent and back away.
The crew, however, do not. They grab axes and rush at the locks on the two doors.
Cecilia intercepts the one who is about to loose the panther, stepping in front of him and letting his momentum push him into the wooden stake.
He drops his axe, and his body follows it.
But Cecilia is too late to prevent the second axe.
The metal cleaves with a spark and the door to Seymour’s cabin falls open.
Cecilia had half expected the room to be filled with the swirling light of the bordweal, or some such nonsense – the captain’s superstitions must have crept inside her head against her will.
But no – Lady Seymour stands in the middle of the room, calm as a heifer.
Some among Cecilia’s court charge forward, forgetting their queen’s orders, and lay hands on the woman.
They drag her, unprotesting, from her cabin and push-pull her up the stairs to the deck, shouting witch and traitor.
“You fools!” Cecilia shouts, brandishing the dagger, but her people dart out of her way, their need for immediate survival outweighing their fear of Cecilia.
On deck, another lightning bolt shoots from the white centre of the bordweal, rending one of the sails in two and sending the halves crashing to the deck, aflame.
In the commotion, Seymour’s captors release her.
But instead of fleeing, Seymour walks steadily to the prow of the ship, as if communing with the storm.
Cecilia follows her, as stealthily as she can manage.
She needs Seymour alive, as an offering to Henry, leverage – Seymour and Cecilia’s silence in exchange for Brynd.
“I know you are there, Cecilia,” Seymour says over the fray. “The bordweal talks to me. It tells me you are come to capture me once more.”
“What do you mean, talks to you?” Cecilia says.
“I can barely hear it, but it is there. It has not used its voice for many hundreds of years.”
Cecilia is always hungry – hungry for food, for sex, for excitement – but she has never known the hunger that sweeps over her now.
It is visceral, this desire to commune with something as ingrained in her identity as the bordweal.
How dare this little creep of a girl take what should be Cecilia’s by royal birthright?
She limps across the deck. There will be some kind of blood rite she can perform to make the woman’s power her own: spilling, smearing, drinking.
Cernunnos would approve, Cernunnos would help, if she offered him blood.
But as she comes near, Seymour swirls round to face her. She is holding one hand out in front of her, palm up, and in that palm is a ball of bordweal light.
“Come no closer,” Seymour says.